U.S. policy toward Iran clearly has failed. This has been conspicuously true for at least the last six years since former president Donald Trump reneged on the multilateral agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that restricted Iran’s nuclear program. He did so despite Iran’s compliance with those restrictions, which had effectively closed the paths to a possible Iranian nuclear weapon.

Trump’s administration later expanded sanctions on Iran to all-out economic warfare termed “maximum pressure.” The Biden administration has continued most of its predecessor’s economic pressure on Iran, notwithstanding Republican efforts to make an issue out of limited waivers needed to permit technical discussions in the interest of nuclear nonproliferation and the partial unfreezing of some Iranian assets as part of a prisoner swap. The current administration has even added anti-Iran sanctions of its own.

In short, whatever Iran has been doing lately that one might choose to describe as bad or nefarious, it is doing during continued heavy economic pressure from the United States.

The policy failure is most glaring regarding nuclear matters. Released from the JCPOA limitations, Iran significantly expanded its nuclear activities, especially the enrichment of uranium. Most estimates of the “breakout time” needed to produce the fissile material for a nuclear weapon if Iran chose to do so went from about a year under the JCPOA to as little as a couple of weeks today.

Nor has the U.S. policy succeeded regarding other Iranian conduct. The U.S. sanctions have shown no sign of reducing objectionable Iranian activity in the Middle East, which in some respects became even more conspicuous after the introduction of maximum pressure. Nor has the pressure campaign softened hardline politics in Tehran. It more likely has had the opposite effect.

Columnist Fareed Zakaria aptly describes what passes for U.S. policy toward Iran as not a coherent policy at all but instead “an attitude based primarily on pandering to American domestic audiences by looking ‘tough.’” A similar problem has characterized many other applications of sanctions for years whenever American politicians want to be seen dealing with a foreign adversary in a way that is tougher than a diplomatic demarche but less costly and risky than a military attack. Given that Iran is, as Zakaria puts it, the most sanctioned country on the planet, the policy failure is especially acute in its case.

Zakaria gives one specific explanation for the failure: The sanctions have fallen especially hard not on Iranian decision-makers but on the Iranian middle class, causing them to lose faith in reformist politicians who favor the easing of international tensions and the settling of differences through diplomacy. That explanation is valid, but there are also other reasons the pressure-based approach is misguided, such as a fundamental misunderstanding of Iranian interests and objectives.

The underlying notion—heard repeatedly in rhetoric and even serious policy discussions about Iran—is that the regime in Tehran is inherently different from any government one would want to do business with in that it is hard-wired to seek regional domination. The image is one of Iran being the evil prime mover of most or even all of the mayhem and instability in the Middle East. According to this image, any decent Iranian leader—not one so hard-wired—would quickly stop everything Iran does that gets labeled as “nefarious” and that the United States finds objectionable. A further corollary of the image is that if economic pressure could bring about such a change in leadership and policies in Tehran, it would turn Iran into a “normal” country worthy of acceptance in the international community.

Zakaria, in his otherwise perceptive column about the failure of the U.S. pressure campaign, voices aspects of this notion. He writes that the Iranian regime’s “aggressive policy directed against Washington and its allies in the region” is based on its “DNA.” He expresses hope that “one day, this great nation will be able to return to its rightful place of prestige in the region and the world.”

There were kernels of truth in some of this imagery in the first years after the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah. Some of those who made the revolution believed then that what they had established in Iran would be unlikely to survive without corresponding political changes in nearby states. But now, forty-five years later, and with the Islamic Republic still standing, any such thinking is no longer relevant.

Far from regional domination being on the agenda, Iran today faces the challenge of being a mostly Shia and Persian country seeking influence in a mostly Sunni and Arab region. Like any other middle-sized power, it certainly does seek influence in its own region. And like most “normal” middle powers, its leaders realize that diplomacy and cooperation are better ways of doing that than mayhem and instability, provided that it is given the opportunity to use those peaceful tools.

This realization was evident even before the election in July of moderate president Masoud Pezeshkian, replacing the hardliner Ebrahim Raisi. A salient data point was the restoration of diplomatic relations with regional rival Saudi Arabia in March 2023. Now, Pezeshkian is seeking a diplomacy-based expansion of positive relations with the West and other Middle Eastern neighbors, beginning with his just-completed visit to Iraq.

Far from Iran being the prime mover of all untoward developments in the Middle East, Iranian foreign and security policy has been overwhelmingly reactive. Most Iranian actions entered on lists of nefarious or destabilizing Iranian behavior have been responses to what someone else has done to Iran. The driver of the Iranian actions has not been some strand of DNA in Tehran. 

Instead, the drivers operate similarly in most other nations that get attacked. One is the visceral one of seeking revenge. Another is the more calculated one of—to use a term frequently voiced in the West—“re-establishing deterrence.”

For example, the salvo of missiles and drones that Iran launched against Israel in April was a direct response to multiple Israeli attacks against Iranian interests. These attacks have included an ongoing Israeli air campaign in Syria that has focused on Iran-related targets and—as the immediate precipitating event that brought retaliation—a lethal Israeli attack on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.

Similarly, an Iranian missile attack in January 2020 on two Iraqi air bases that house U.S. troops was retaliation for the U.S. assassination of senior Iranian military and political leader Qassem Soleimani. And lest Soleimani himself be regarded as a prime mover, it should be recalled that the principal U.S. grievance against him—his role in helping to arm forces resisting the U.S. occupation of Iraq—was itself a response to a war of aggression that the United States had launched in March 2003 in the country next door to Iran.

The biggest attack of all against the Islamic Republic of Iran was the devastating eight-year war that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein initiated in 1980—and in which Saddam’s regime received U.S. assistance. Major parts of Iranian policy today, including its extensive efforts to secure influence in Iraq, still reflect the traumatizing experience of the Iran-Iraq war, in which several hundred thousand Iranians died. The current dynamic of relations between Iran and Iraq is less a matter of anyone seeking regional hegemony than of both countries being determined to maintain cordial enough relations—as Pezeshkian’s visit this month has underscored—that the horror of the 1980s war will never be repeated.

Similar motivations underlie Iran’s relationships with other regimes and groups in the region, which habitually but mistakenly get labeled Iranian “proxies.” The supposed proxies have their own agendas, as illustrated by how the biggest violent move by any of them in recent years—the attack by Hamas in southern Israel in October 2023—surprised Iran as much as it did anyone else.

The alliance Iran maintains with its leading nonstate partner—Lebanese Hezbollah—is primarily about maintaining a deterrent against Israel. That Iran perceives the need for such a deterrent is unsurprising, given that it faces an Israel that already has initiated repeated violent attacks inside Iran, including assassinations and sabotage, that voices and stokes unending hostility toward Iran, and that openly threatens more and possible larger attacks on Iran.

Hezbollah’s rocket stockpile provides a close-in retaliatory capability that may have already helped to deter the escalation of some of the Israel-related violence in the region this year. Iran’s reliance on this close-in deterrent reflects its inferior military capability vis-à-vis Israel and especially, notwithstanding that missile salvo in April (which caused minimal damage and only one injury), its lesser ability to project power at a distance.

A common justification for maintaining the economic warfare against Iran is that even if such pressure does not induce Iranian leaders to change their policies, it reduces the resources Iran has to act on those policies. However, as the comparison of Iranian conduct before and after the initiation of maximum pressure has demonstrated, such resource constraints do not stop Iran from doing many of the things we might wish it would not do. What Iranian leaders consider to be in Iran’s national security interests—including neutralizing, preparing for, or retaliating for genuine threats to Iran—they will do despite scarce resources. American policy-makers, who have not let big budget deficits and economic dislocation stand in the way of even waging an offensive war, ought to be able to relate to that.

This gets to the most fundamental reason that pressure against Iran has failed. It has failed not because the Iranian regime is different from other “normal” governments but because of respects in which it is similar. Many Iranian actions the West considers objectionable are similar to ones that Western leaders—if placed in a similar situation, with everything that means regarding threats, conflicts, and being on the receiving end of attacks—also would take.

There remain other respects in which Iranian conduct is justly condemnable. One could put on that list an apparent return by Iran to extraterritorial assassination of dissidents, as well as election interference and other irregular behavior. Also condemnable, as Zakaria appropriately notes, is a miserable record of human rights violations within Iran. The targeted use of sticks as well as carrots to steer Iran away from some of these behaviors is more likely to succeed if divorced from the wholesale and unrealistic approach that the maximum pressure policy takes toward Iranian conduct as a whole.

Meanwhile, maximum pressure exacerbates the failure of U.S. policy in several other respects. One is that the same sanctions that sock it to the Iranian middle class have encouraged the growth of a smuggling-based economy from which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) profits the most. So much for sanctions supposedly reducing the wherewithal for nefarious behavior by the likes of the IRGC.

Another is that economic strain has pushed Iran closer to, and more dependent on, trade with, Russia. The trade extends to arms, including drones and missiles that Russia uses in its war against Ukraine and that have provided the rationale for the most recent new U.S. sanctions on Iran. 

Yet another disadvantage is that a U.S. policy of only ostracizing and pressuring Iran rather than engaging with it eliminates the possibility of fruitful cooperation on topics where Iranian and U.S. interests run parallel or where Iran must be part of any solution and not just written off as a part of the problem. One such topic is countering radical Islamist terrorism of the Islamic State variety, in which Iran has been a major target. Another is the security in the Persian Gulf region, which could build on Iran’s rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

Image: MH Jahanpanah / Shutterstock.com.